CITY of HEROES' most iconic hero, Statesman, met an untimely death in Chapter 5 of the game's first Signature Story Arc. To commemorate the solemn event, I was tasked with this painting of the funeral, which includes appearances by a rather large number of characters.

Statesman's former Freedom Phalanx teammates serve as pall bearers, and his granddaughter, Ms. Liberty, follows in a daze while flanked by her fellow Vindicators. Hero Corps and Longbow members look on, with a wide variety of Paragon's other heroes also in attendance.

------------Given the RIDICULOUS number of characters to draw and the complexity of their costumes, I approached this one a little differently than normal. Instead of going straight to paint, I actually loaded up most of these specific models in the game editor, then meticulously posed and screen-capped each one. From there, I arranged them in proper perspective and corrected all the poses, before finally repainting everything under a consistent lighting scheme. Still a ton of work, but at least I got a detailed underpainting 'for free.'

Another interesting tidbit: this was the first time players got to see Penelope Yin in her new super-hero outfit (she's the girl in red and white, slightly behind the main funeral party). It was a blast watching people on the forums speculate about who she might be and why she got such prime placement in the composition.

Hi David! I'm a CoH player of 7 years, and with CoH now being gone, I was thinking of creating a memorial-type website/fan site. I would LOVE to use this image, however, am worried about copyrights, etc., though I've seen it posted on a few Facebook pages. Can you let me know if I could use this image on the new site I'll be creating, and possibly on a Facebook page, etc.? Thanks in advance!

If you ever do another piece using this technique (or if you still have work-files from this) I'd love to see a step-by-step development series. Painting over 3D captures seems like even more work than doing it all from scratch.

No step-by-step exists, and while it was a long process, it wasn't TOO long. Got a lot of extra detail this way that would've gone by the wayside otherwise. That said, I don't think I'd jump to try this again--captured characters look like captured characters regardless of how you light them. They don't look like real people and they don't look particularly stylized, so in the end, I just didn't feel like there was enough of "me" in this pic, y'know? That's why I probably won't use the technique much in the future.

Yeah, I think it was a few weeks after your picture first came out that the beta leak was discovered - although one HUGE clue that came out before your picture, but which no one picked up on, was the model for Praetorian Penny on the MoM Trial

Good eye! Every sig who was relavant to the story made it in (Positron helped me figure out where everyone should be), but of course I had to leave out both Manticore and Sister Psyche for continuity reasons.

Wow! You know I wasn't big fan of States, however this scene really touched me. When I watched cinematic trailer for City of Heroes, the moment all heroes move out on Statesman's order the moment I knew I should play this game. It took place on very same stairs leading to City Hall.

Great work as usual, Mr. Nakayama.

Heh maybe I should copy one of the attenders outfit and say "I was there, on Statesman's funeral".

Took me a second to figure out that the crowd is all mostly costume-bundle models (five elemental orders and no barbarians? Tch. ). I also notice you used a lot of the Freedom Corps vendors instead of generic Longbow troops (I've always wanted to give a name and backstory to the one with green skin and hair). All in all this really has a great feeling of solemnity and sadness that such an event would have.

I'm not sure if the Barbarian set was completed at this point, actually. To keep the project from taking forever, I had to use whatever costume sets I could easily spawn via the editor, so there were a few limitations. In a perfect world and with unlimited time, it would've been nice to get actual player costumes like I did for Issue 12 of the Top Cow comic, but yeah, it was just an issue of time.

Ah, you beat me to that punch, then It was a rather quick-notice how all the non-Sig characters were all default costume sets, but ah well.

Also, canon-correction for the description; Ms Liberty is State's GRANDdaughter, not daughter

Still can't say I'm a fan of Penny's new outfit. At least here it looked like the midriff was covered by the white spandex. In the in-game model the white area is far too small to balance out the black and red. In my opinion, anyway.